1. Technical Field
This invention relates to the field of telephony and, more particularly, to linking telephony service platforms and call control platforms.
2. Description of the Related Art
Within telecommunications networks, telephony services dealing with speech processing typically are provided by a voice processing node. The voice processing node can be computer-based application platform which connects with the conventional circuit-switched telephony network through a suitable gateway interface. To facilitate rapid application development, an increasing number of such voice processing nodes have the ability to execute scripting languages. A variety of different scripting languages suited for the development of voice processing services have emerged which allow developers to quickly bring to market various interactive voice processing and voice response services.
One type of voice processing node is a voice server. A voice server can include a speech recognition engine, a text-to-speech engine, a voice browser which can execute voice processing scripts, as well as interfaces to various telephony platforms. For example, International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation of Armonk, N.Y. provides a voice server product known as IBM WebSphere® Voice Server which performs the functions described.
A telephony application platform within the telecommunications network is a computer-based application platform which can communicate with the circuit switched telecommunications network via a suitable gateway interface similar to a voice server. A telephony application platform, however, can provide call control functions as well as integrate other business and electronic commerce applications. For example, IBM Corporation provides a telephony application platform known as IBM WebSphere® Telecom Application Server which functions substantially as described.
While voice servers have come to rely upon scripted applications to facilitate timely service deployment, telephony application platforms utilize other open standards for providing functionality. More particularly, telephony application platforms typically provide an application platform having a virtual machine capable of executing applications written in an open standard programming language such as JAVA. Although telephony application platforms can be implemented which execute scripting languages such as Call Control Extensible Markup Language (CCXML) which support call control functions, still, such telephony application platforms must implement execution environments which differ substantially from the execution environment provided by a voice processing node.
Accordingly, telephony services which provide both voice services as well as call control functionality utilize both a voice processing node and a telephony application platform. In order for each node to work cooperatively with the other, however, a developer essentially must design and build two different applications, one for use in the voice processing node and the other for use in the telephony application platform. The need to design two different applications stems largely from the fact that each node utilizes a different application platform to provide functionality. While the voice server processes scripts such as Voice Extensible Markup Language (VXML) documents or applications, the telephony application platform executes functionally different scripts and/or open standard language applications which require a virtual machine.
Not only are individual applications necessary for each telephony node, but in order to develop the applications, developers require two different application development environments. Developers require a development environment suited for the development of voice processing scripts for the voice processing node and a development environment having reusable software components and a virtual machine to develop applications for the telephony application platform.